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The Export-Import Bank of the U.S. has arranged financing for the SpaceX launch of a Hispasat satellite, the first space deal it has done in six years.


WASHINGTON — The Export-Import Bank of the United States has arranged financing for the SpaceX launch of a Hispasat satellite, the first space deal the bank has done in six years.

Ex-Im announced June 21 that it approved $80.7 million in financing for a Falcon 9 launch of a Hispasat satellite, Amazonas Nexus, as well as launch and initial in-orbit insurance. The bank said the financing will be in the form of either a direct loan or a loan guarantee.

The Spanish operator announced in early 2020 it ordered Amazonas Nexus from Thales Alenia Space. The 4500-kilogram satellite will replace Amazonas-2 at 61 degrees west in geostationary orbit. At the time of the contract announcement, Hispasat said it expected to launch the satellite in the second half of 2022. Bpifrance, France’s export credit agency, is financing the construction of the satellite.

Biologists in the UK and Austria have discovered 71 new imprinted genes in the mouse genome.

Biologists at the Universities of Bath and Vienna have discovered 71 new ‘imprinted’ genes in the mouse genome, a finding that takes them a step closer to unraveling some of the mysteries of epigenetics – an area of science that describes how genes are switched on (and off) in different cells at different stages in development and adulthood.

To understand the importance of imprinted genes to inheritance, we need to step back and ask how inheritance works in general. Most of the thirty trillion cells in a person’s body contain genes that come from both their mother and father, with each parent contributing one version of each gene. The unique combination of genes goes part of the way to making an individual unique. Usually, each gene in a pair is equally active or inactive in a given cell. This is not the case for imprinted genes. These genes – which make up less than one percent of the total of 20000+ genes – tend to be more active (sometimes much more active) in one parental version than the other.

Chipmaker patches nine high-severity bugs in its Jetson SoC framework tied to the way it handles low-level cryptographic algorithms.

Flaws impacting millions of internet of things (IoT) devices running NVIDIA’s Jetson chips open the door for a variety of hacks, including denial-of-service (DoS) attacks or the siphoning of data.

NVIDIA released patches addressing nine high-severity vulnerabilities including eight additional bugs of less severity. The patches fix a wide swath of NVIDIA’s chipsets typically used for embedded computing systems, machine-learning applications and autonomous devices such as robots and drones.
Impacted products include Jetson chipset series; AGX Xavier, Xavier NX/TX1, Jetson TX2 (including Jetson TX2 NX), and Jetson Nano devices (including Jetson Nano 2GB) found in the NVIDIA JetPack software developers kit. The patches were delivered as part of NVIDIA’s June security bulletin, released Friday.

It’s good that this could improve warehouse safety.

But what about people’s job security?

Cheddar news.


Amazon unveiled four new warehouse robots (Ernie, Bert, Scooter and Kermit) on Sunday. The group is currently undergoing testing and development to help reduce injuries and strenuous activities for their human colleagues.